this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

(page 3) 50 comments
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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (13 children)

is the s in esrtweets for "shitty"? because holy fuck are they shitty

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

On top of the disgusting subject matter, why do these people think that even unlimited-character Twitter is a good format for posting these screeds? The site design, even on the main site, is absolutely terrible for presenting this much writing. Everything mashed into the constrained center column means way too many line breaks, meaning it's a chore to read. Same thing with that freak Ackman; whatever overwrought bullshit he was posting just made my eyes glaze over.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

libertarianism.tweet

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I made a sneer about moving from Twitter to yet another Jack Dorsey social network, but after looking into it he apparently left Bluesky and joined Musk's team instead, because of moderation options. Geez, maybe I should sign up. But creating and keeping track of new accounts to sites is a pain in the aaaaaaassssss.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Dorsey jumping ship's about as good a reason as any to jump to Bluesky, especially considering Twitter's currently haemorrhaging users from the one-two-three punch of the AI training, the crippled blocking and THE ELECTION^tm^.

By my guess, the AI training is probably doing the most damage - that one's prompting artists to bolt for the exits, and if Tumblr's NSFW ban taught me anything, its that if the artists start leaving, they're gonna start taking their fans with them.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yea, the artists are about half the reason for me to be on that site to begin with.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)
They made this terrible thing look like a train
There's something sweet in the air what I can't say
Would I like a drink to calm the brain?
Oh, please stay in the chairs

But oh, God
I don't wanna go to Mars
What kind of brainwashed idiot does?
It's all a lab rat life in jars
They branded the dream of ages
I don't wanna go to Mars
Be with me here and return to dust

-- White Lies, I Don't Want To Go To Mars, 2022

I remember really liking it when I heard it around first release. it holds up.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You ever have that moment where you hear about a song and only then realize that you had liked 2 or 3 from the same band from radio or recommendations over the years without connecting that it was the same group? Because yeah that just hit me.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

I first heard Bush’s Chemicals Between Us from a neighbours soundsystem during a party one weekend in the early 00s, and then it took me well over a decade to find it (while still hearing other Bush songs over the years)

yep I know exactly what you’re describing there

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Another proposal for naming our militia: The Cassandra Division

Our Motto: "Sic diximus vobis"

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (7 children)

is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we've endured that's gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

Just chiming in to say to hell with skeuomorphism, I still want Apple Platinum back. Bonus points if it comes with an option for Dark Platinum that was only present in the early releases of OS X Server.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

to the computing side, and with the proviso that in my own estimation of my skills I am at best slightly less than "dangerously clueless": unfortunately not as much as may be desired because the kind of chips being added are fairly specialised silicon

it's not impossible that people may find other uses for it over time but to the best of my knowledge as it stands right now much of this shit is dead weight the moment this bubble pops

(I don't think it will all go entirely away; there are some ML uses that are not complete trash. but that's a long different arc)

I'm not sure I follow the skeu side of your comment?

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldn't be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuff...

So, from what you're saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

broad brush strokes, yes largely that

there's some extremely fucking interesting details in the weeds, but that's beyond the scope of merely a comment (and also I don't feel equipped to make a goodpost about it as yet)

[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My baseline understanding is that "NPUs," as such, are vector accelerators with perhaps lower precision and definitely lower peak TDP. I say this because much of the incremental ML research I've skimmed over seems to be around getting away with lower precision, dropping down to FP8 or even FP4 from FP16 when they can get away with it.

I'm still confused as to why and how this is an acceptable tradeoff to firing up an iGPU with precise power/TDP stepping. Perhaps one of those situations where the power budget and latency to fire up the whole GPU block or burst it to max power ends up costing as much as the actual calculation. I think for purposes of this discussion, we also need a source that sheds light on the architectural differences between NPUs and GPU shader/execution units.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Got recommended a video from a friend, and its a damn good sneer at the state of YouTube sponsorships:

Why YouTube Sponsors Are (Almost) Always Terrible

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

It amazes me how well SponsorBlock works and how bad YouTube feels without it. I guess the main downside is that it's a little harder to tell the good 'toobers with strong moral backbone who don't shill awful shit in the first place from those whose sponsor segments merely get automatically skipped.

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